2013 Competition Entrants

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deciBall is an arcade instrument of creativity. A digital playground where your toys are Sound and Colors. Chip and Tune your way through the Chamber, playing music, making noise, painting pixels and destroying the world! Enjoy a new way to explore the infinite universe of the imagination.

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'6180 the moon' is a platformer game with a unique system. It offers a fresh, different game play style by connecting the top and bottom of the game screen. So, unlike traditional platformer games, dying by falling down does not happen and the mechanic of jumping is maximized. '6180 the moon' delivers a fable-like storyline in which the moon goes on a journey to find the mysteriously disappeared sun.

This game was co-created by South Korea's Indie Game Studios, Turtle Cream and PokPoong Games. Link to PokPoong Games: http://pok-poong.blogspot.com

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There is a wonderful tale within you. It is the story of your ancestors and how you came to be. Tales of love, striving, family struggles, excellence, tragedy. Then there are the great legends: rags to riches, world-changing discoveries, and heroic adventure. Some may even be true.

'7 Grand Steps' is the game that connects people to the cultural roots of western civilization. From the sweat of laborers to the perspective of kings, experience the wonder of a family lineage that survived the changing ages. Or did they survive? How you guide them will determine their fate.

Like life, gameplay is a constantly shifting puzzle. Try to get the most for spending resources in the best way and in the best order. Every turn, the optimal tactic will change. Some turns will be joyful, perfectly played. In some you'll see a more optimal play, too late.

The basics are simple: spend resources to advance, but the price of resources is retreat. Think two steps forward, one step back. Behind awaits the hunger of crocodiles, ahead the challenge of ages. It's a bit like life but more grand.

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8BitMMO is a massively multiplayer game created by one developer over the past eleven years. It's a retro-style 2D construction sandbox -- you can build a home or a castle in a persistent streaming world. Or become a mayor and build sprawling cities with your friends. Feeling evil? Build a dungeon for players to fight mobs in. Destroy the evil Lawyercats and engage in player vs player battle!

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8th wave is an underwater endless side-scrolling shoot-'em up game designed for modern mobile platforms. The game features a unique humorous visual style, intuitive controls and complete randomization at each turn. Whenever you have a few minutes to spare, the game will always be ready to show you something new and exciting.
Once released, expect regular updates containing new visuals, content and game changing mechanics.

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A Clockwork Brain is a fun and challenging puzzle game, suitable for the whole family, and perfect for exercising those grey cells. It comes with more than a dozen original, brain-bending mini-games and features one-tap, bite-sized, fast-paced gameplay. The game is meticulously hand-painted with influences from Victorian Steampunk and Mayan art.

Some features:

*Challenge Mode: Pick four games to play in a row and challenge yourself!
*Tokens and Upgrades: Earn Tokens as you play and use them to unlock free upgrades!
*Leaderboards: Are you the best? Compete globally and find out!
*Achievements: More than 30 achievements to earn and prove your worth!
*Insane Round: If you haven't reached that, you've still got some way to go!

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A Duck Has An Adventure is unique hypercomic adventure game that challenges you to discover all the different possible lives one duck could live. From adventures on the high seas to the halls of academia and beyond, every choice you make builds a new pathway along which to explore.

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A Million Minions is a humorous, cartoony action game that pits you - a castle in idyllic Youville - against an endless horde of cute and squishy minions. It all starts when three big, bad brothers steal your kingdom's candy scepter for nefarious purposes. You must retrieve it, else it may never rain candy again!

A Million Minions is designed for use with Intel's Perceptual Computing (motion control) cameras. You can smash and pound by performing gestures mid-air, just like all those futuristic books and shows promised. That said, until we figure out a good way to get cameras to judges, the game is also playable with a conventional PC mouse.

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A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. A custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics engine allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player's own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience.

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A perfect place. A city without traffic. A dog that doesn't poop. All products of the brilliant mind of Dr. X, but hell hath no fury like a mad scientist fired by a giant corporation. In this unique action-puzzler you take control of TOM, a virus created for one purpose: revenge.

Hack your way through brain scrambling puzzles while maneuvering through a thumb cramping maze of enemies. Team up through over 50 cooperative levels in what MMGN is calling "The most addictive co-op game we've played since Portal 2." And if the over 100 levels aren't enough, you and your friends can destroy each other again and again in battle mode to determine just who is the supreme virus.

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"About Love, Hate and the other ones" is a cute puzzle game in which you take control of the two main characters Love and Hate. Guide them through 60 levels to take them back home to their beloved hill. You will encounter different other ones with unique behaviours, depending on whether Love or Hate interacts with them. Created by Black Pants in coproduction with brush&bear. The game has already received an honorable mention at the IGF back when it was a flash game prototype. It won the German Computer Games Award in the newcomer category with an early beta version of what is now available at the Apple App Store.

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Horatio Hawk has stolen a priceless artifact from a Mayan temple, and it is up to you to stop that dirty bird before he can escape! You'll have to explore every nook and cranny for weapons, abilities and extra lives if you are to have any hope of success...each level is full of dangerous critters (not to mention brutish bosses!), all with an appetite for monkey blood!

The Mayan Mystery is heavily inspired by my favourite game as a kid: Metroid. The challenge is high, the pixels are unapologetic, and it's my hope that if you were glued to your tv trying to find your way through the labyrinthine caverns of Zebes, the experience of navigating the crumbling Mayan hallways will ignite your sense of nostalgia.

To help this sense of nostalgia, I've also created an instruction manual for the game with drawings of all the enemies and bosses, along with secret information to help guide you on your quest! :)

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Against the Wall is a first-person puzzle-platformer set on the side of an infinite wall. Entire civilizations and ecosystems cling for survival on the side of the wall, everyone and everything existing under the constant threat of tumbling into an endless sky. The wall is made up of square white bricks of varying sizes. You can pull these bricks out of the wall to form platforms, stairs, and paths. Along the way, you'll encounter cities, forests, volcanoes, castles, and other environments in your journey through this strange world.

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From the synergy between good old Platformers and RPG is born the ultimate, new, true iPhone game… Air Jump!

With a completely new game experience, especially with the accelerometer and touch, you can take a dangerous journey through a jungle, to your destiny. What danger could be lurking under the next platform? What creature could come up behind you?

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AirBuccaneers is a multiplayer airship pirate game with shamanistic Buccaneers and infamous Vikings fighting over domination of the North. This cooperative 1st person game requires seamless teamwork and strategic battle skills.

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In the place of heroes and villains are people - for the most part - doing what they can to take back their lives from those who would seek to control them for pleasure and profit.

Visit a dark world rotten with corruption in this story-driven 2D action RPG, gain experience by story progression and interaction with the citizens of Elcaea, rather than random acts of violence, and, most of all, do what it takes to survive in a world that would rather see you dead than free.

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Alien Jelly is a 2X Microsoft Dream Build Play finalist and has earned a honorable mention for production quality in 2011. It is now live on XBox Live Indi Games. Alien Jelly is a 3D puzzle game. 3D in all senses of the word. Not only does it sport beautiful 3D HD graphics with loads of custom shaders, the puzzle metrics are all three dimensional. Rotate the world to get your stranded Alien Jellies to the rescue ship so they can get back to lunch. Push crates, rotate the world, evade and destroy robots, dodge huge spiky things and generally figure out how to get home. Once you are done playing the bring twisting 40 levels, you can try your hand at making them too! Try the easy to use Alien Jelly Build-O-Matic™ to make any level you have seen in the game in more. All 40 levels for the game were made and polished in the Build-O-Matic™. Once you think you have a cracker of a level, share it with your XBox Live Arcade friends and see if they can decipher your mind bender. Got some friends over? Well sit them on the couch and try to work together to solve any level with more than one Alien Jelly in it.

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Alien x Zombie is a game about war and surviving, with vibrance and fun. Ways to approach to targets are based on a basic concept of Physics, and follow unfamiliar rules. Obstacles are also a matter of perception.

You as an Alien journey through the different worlds, get rid of Zombies, manipulate proper weapons, and find new ways to get the best solution for different surroundings in this puzzling action game!

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Alone in the Park is an adventure game in which the events are conveyed via a textual narration instead of animations. So it's very much like a text adventure, but the player interacts with the game via a graphical interface, negotiating a map and static scenes.

The game world is inspired by the surreal yet prosaic world of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, in the way it satirises everyday contemporary archetypes as well as the very idea of fantasy and adventure itself.

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Alphabet City takes the names of places around you and puts them into a fast-paced, addictive word game. Compete with your neighbors to become the Wordsmith of your favorite spots. Cleverly use a wide range of power-ups to boost your skills and earn outrageous scores. Get ready to rewrite your world!

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Summary: Attempt to beat your best marathon time while your running rival's henchmen try to slow you down! Dodge obstacles they have placed in your path and defeat individual henchmen in turn-based combat.

Description: A linear, replayable 10-15min adventure in which you must dodge obstacles and defeat a sequence of characters as fast as possible to get the best marathon time. Battles are short, turn-based fights with timing mini-games that determine the power of your attacks. Obstacle dodging sections appear between the battles and allow you to regain some of your lost speed and stamina. When you've completed a race – start over again to try to beat your best time using the skills and strategies you have learned.

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'An Fuaim', from the Gaelic for sound & noise, is a game wherein you create music and explore the multiverse.

The player is compelled by gravity to the nearest surfaces and must master this ability to find all the missing pieces. Sometimes what you're looking for is beyond space and time itself, sometimes you're just looking past it.

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Analogue: A Hate Story is a dark visual novel about investigating a long-derelict generation ship, discovering power relationships, family histories, records of violence; and examining the ways in which misogyny manifests, and is survived.

Read through dozens of diary entries that paint a portrait of life aboard the ship, engage in terminal hacking, and maybe even discover friendship or romance with one of the two spunky AI sidekicks over the course of the investigation.

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Play!
- Avoid, stun then collect aliens who dance to your music.*
- Five different aliens each have their own dance patterns. Learn them to master the game.
- Build your lifetime score for the top rank in the Andromedub community.

Create!
- Create alien dances and drive the background effects by tapping and dragging to the beat of your favorite songs.
- Share the dances you created with the community or play someone else's.
- Create great dances and get five star ratings from other players!
- Sharing your created dances online is easy! Just tap the Share Your Dance button at the end of each dance you make.

*Includes music by indie musicians Bazooie and Crashfaster. Create, share & play alien dances to any song in your music library.

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Anodyne is an adventure game where you explore and fight your way through nature, urban, and abstract influenced landscapes and dungeons set in the dream world of the human Young, in order to uncover the roots of the manifestation of Young's dreams.

Anodyne explores the combination of 16-bit artistic and musical aesthetics with gameplay influenced by games such as Link's Awakening and Yume Nikki.

Anodyne is created by Sean Hogan (@seagaia2) (code, music) and Jon Kittaka (@jonathankittaka) (art, writing). Anodyne is aiming for an early January 2013 release for Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux distros that can run Adobe AIR 2.6, via Desura, GamersGate and hopefully a few more.

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Take control of a heroic antibody and engage waves of dangerous antigens.

Antibody is an intense arcade style shoot-em-up played entirely with the mouse. Movements can only be performed using a refilling boost gauge, requiring precision relocation to survive the escalating waves.

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Due to a sudden shortage of milk, cats around the world are forced to seek out new sources to get their fix.
You and your team of milk mining kittens have overcome a fear of water to drill down under the ocean seabed and begin extracting vast reserves of what seems to be naturally forming full-fat milk.

Get ready for fast paced submarine action, defending the kittens from disruptive mechanical sea creatures.
THE MILK MUST FLOW!

Aqua Kitty is a 2D pixel drawn arcade shooter, created with a love of the 16-bit gaming era and late 80s video arcade games.
The game includes such features as:

Fast paced horizontally scrolling looping underwater levels.

Branching map progression of levels.

Varying sea depths per level that subtly affect gameplay.

A dual firing submarine with a rechargeable secondary weapon that needs to be managed carefully (upgrades through game progress).

A variety of mechanical enemies to encounter each with differing behaviours.

Chain kill combo system allowing the more skilled player to maximise score.

Depth based power-up system that gives partial control on the type and location of the power-ups created (allowing tactical advantage).

Both level high score and 100% kitten saviour challenges

For the super hard-core god-like players, a classic infinite and milk-free level that never ever ends.

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Arcadecraft is a realtime strategy Arcade economics simulator. Starting in January of 1980 the player is given the task to run a sustainable arcade for a decade. To accomplish this goal they have to purchase arcade games from the various fictional manufacturers and place them within their retail space so that they can earn money. The more money the machines make, the more games you can buy!

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Arena Tactics is a unique online strategy RPG game for iOS devices. The game features 9 champions(more coming in updates) that you use to fight AI controlled opponents or other players online in teams of 3 or 4. Each champion has two specializations with 4 abilities and can be equipped with many different items to create hundreds of unique combinations.

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Armada Online is a multiplayer action rpg. You are the captain of a starship, fighting against biomechanical aliens known as the Armada. We built the game as an engine for smoothly transitioning between many different game types, that can be approached many different ways. Some areas play like a dota game, some areas play like multi tower defense, or open exploration. Each area gives players a distinct set of toys to play with. The players can be creative about how they want to collaborate or solve problems.

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You are a ruler of a kingdom in the dark ages. In the midst of chaos caused by faith, are you prepared to lay down your life and build an empire for the glory of your god... or perhaps for yourself?

Army and Strategy: The Crusades is a game based on the conflicts between the Crusaders and Muslim during the Middle Ages. As a ruler of the dark era, you must expand your territory and create an empire to glorify either your faith or your honor.

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As Slow As Possible (ASLAP) was inspired by a composition ("ASLSP") of notorious American composer John Cage. The original tempo instruction for the performing musicians was: as slow as possible. This videogame is investigating what "as slow as possible" could mean in the context of a videogame. How slow can a game become? One aspect of ASLAP (the videogame) and of ASLSP (the composition) is the perception of time and of the human time scale that goes from birth to death.

ASLAP starts slow, you need to "phase yourself in." It starts slow and gets slower and slower. And slower. Ad infinitum. Each player should decide for her/himself, how slow "as slow as possible" is.

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The gameplay is all about controlling a ship versus the inertia and gravity. The challenge of flying your way through the levels was made exciting and fun thanks to an innovative approach of physics.

The fuel that powers the ship is limited, and the energy of the ship will go down on each collision. Dealing with the fuel consumption and the ship's life condition, the player must fly through 24 levels, avoid walls & traps, collect some special items and then land properly.

Artistically speaking, the visuals are not meant to be ultra-realistic. A simple cartoonish color scheme was developed.
The game itself happens in a 2D play-field, and the visuals are all handled in 3D, offering a depth experience that make it more compelling but does not overwhelm the gameplay.

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Astro Duel is a competitive astroid-style four player space arena for iPad. Inspired from endless nights of Super Bomberman, rounds are quick and death is sudden.

Each player's ship is controlled wirelessly with an iPhone or iPod touch. Arm your ship with 7 different power ups including missiles, lasers and auto-turrets. Varied arenas bring a host of hiding places and hazards like death beams and black holes. Blow up your friends, rinse and repeat.

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ATUM is a game that pulls the player into a world where the player is the mechanic. It brings a novelty take on the point-and-click gameplay of previous generations and it combines it with 'platformer puzzles. The game plays with the concept of multi-layer gameplay, dipping its layers in mathematical loops and philosophical recurrences.

The design and the aesthetics are influenced by sci-fi classics like Blade Runner and Martian Time Slip by Philip K. Dick. There are many in-game references to our sources of inspiration that complement the underlying storyline, using the environment as a narrative device.
ATUM is currently being developed at NHTV IGAD, Breda, The Netherlands as part of the University's Gamelab.

"You Are Here, reads the legend on that map. Which one is you?
Does it matter? Your finger is a pointer on a screen."
—Gene Van Troyer

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Can you imagine a game without graphics?
Can you imagine a game that can be played even by a blind person?

Audio Games: The Secret of the Talisman is that and much, much more. Explore 3D environments, solve puzzles, unravel incredible stories and meet amazing new characters, all using only your sense of hearing!

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It's the year 3587, conflict spans the stars. Huge robot armies are locked in an enduring stalemate. In their bid for galactic conquest they call upon the most powerfull group of mercenaries in the universe: the Awesomenauts!
Join the fight as droid armies, space cowboys, gangsta rapping frogs, and giant robots vie for supremacy!
Awesomenauts brings team-based competetive arena play to a platforming perspective. Awesomenauts is available now on Steam, XBox LIVE Arcade, and Playstation Network.

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Based on the notion that games are often as fun to "break" as they are to play, Axiom Verge is a 2D action/adventure in the style of classic 8- and 16-bit games - but uses the glitches commonly found in such games - map corruption, inventory scrambling, flicker, slowdown, AI bugs, and the like - as "features".

Think of all the things you've done in games that the designers didn't intend for you to do, but which you had a blast with nonetheless? Yeah, THOSE things.

You'll have to play to find out how many of them made their way into Axiom Verge.

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Your friends all disappear after finding some mysterious software online. You logon and discover a hidden, super network... that you can't leave.

Backspace is an arcade adventure set in a virtual world filled with action, exploration, and plenty of secrets!

Key features:
- Use detachable pods to blast through walls and devastate a rich variety of enemies.
- Carry a mixture of cargo to solve puzzles and powerups for compound combat effects.
- Explore a spherical environment, using teleports to move between multiple layers.

Can you unlock the secret of the network and save your friends from mortal danger?

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Bad Hotel is an insane hybrid of a tower defense game and a procedural music toy, with beautiful art and tons of bullets. You are a budding entrepreneur, whose hotel is rather unfortunately located within the territory of Tarnation Tadstock, the Texas Tyrant. Your only defense against Tadstock's army of seagulls, rats, yetis, and more is to build your hotel as quickly and intelligently as possible, using an array of increasingly sophisticated weapons. The beautiful artwork, quirky storyline, and frantic gameplay all work seamlessly together with a generative music system, which creates original music depending on the player's actions and decisions. The player becomes a composer, creating complex musical structures to defend their hotel. A vast variety of music can be generated, from delicate beach chillout to country banjo techno.

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Bag It! - guaranteed to become your new favorite grocery packing mobile game! Heavy, sturdy items on the bottom, light and fragile items on the top – seems simple, right? Think again! Add to it a cast of 10 unique grocery characters, each with their own personalities and relationships that earn you bonuses in-game, and Bag It! will open your eyes to a whole new world inside your shopping bag!

As if packing the perfect bag weren't enough of a challenge, Bag It! also includes a host of different modes that will have you looking at your bag in a whole new way! More of a "breaker" than a "saver"? Then the catharsis of RAMPAGE is for you! Prefer the challenge of fitting the final perfect piece without breaking a single item? Then PUZZLE mode awaits! Leaderboards and ENDLESS modes tickle your fancy? Try your hand at ULTIMATE BAGGER, ENDLESS RAMPAGE, or the deadly berserk scanning laser in POWER SURGE! What's that? Pirates ships, hoards of gold and sea monsters are more your style? Then take your bagging to the beach in SEEDY'S BOOTY -- the crazy matching mode that pits you against your Facebook friends!

With more characters, modes, and unique gameplay being added all the time, Bag It! is more than just a puzzle game, it's a window into a living breathing world inside your supermarket. Check it out!